


Living a Lie

by Sanctuaria



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Clintasha - Freeform, F/M, Heartbreak, Strike Team Delta, Strike Team Delta Origin Story, Unrequited Love, Well more like Origin Vignette, but unrequited - Freeform, don't read if you don't want to come out depressed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 03:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14662755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: When she is too young to know better, Natalia Alianovna Romanova plays at being in love.When she is old enough to know better, she falls for it anyway.





	Living a Lie

 When she is too young to know better, Natalia Alianovna Romanova plays at being in love. It manifests in stolen hugs and late night whispers and secret places. It manifests in the sharing of carefully apportioned food, a lightening of blows on the mat, hidden glances and even more hidden laughter. Most of all, it manifests in a girl, pale-eyed and dimpled, with hair that Natasha likens to the brown of fresh earth turned over a new grave but Elena says is like chocolate. “Chocolate,” Elena claims, arms encircled around Natasha’s waist, “is the best food in the world.” Natasha wouldn’t know, but she believes her. At eight years old, surrounded by violence and destruction and death, she plays at being in love.

Elena doesn’t make it through to the next year.

“Do you know the secret, girls? What allows you to work hard, do your best, acquit yourself well?” Madame B asks them on the training field, standing over a small body whose hair blends in with the dirt between blades of grass. “Musculature. Protein. A healthy body. All things the Academy strives to give you in your food.” She turns to Natalia. “Your turn, Natalia.” Natalia passes the test, as always, and when they are released to other activities finds herself dry-heaving over a chipped white toilet, trying in vain to expel the guilt and six month’s worth of overcooked red meat that Elena had never liked.

Love is for children. A lesson she has learned by the time she is only Natalia Romanova, the name of her father and her connection to family stripped away. There are others in the Room—a wash of faces, names, nods exchanged, small favors done. But that doesn’t stop her from executing her missions as a student and a Widow, dispatching deviant classmates and foreign operatives alike. She learns her lesson well, this time. Why pursue love, when sex is so much easier sans attachments? Why love, when compared to independence, self-assurance, and invulnerability? Love is superfluous to Natalia’s life, a liability she cannot afford, will not allow herself, and quite frankly, doesn’t want. Love is hurt. Love is pain. Love is suffering.

Not that she wants sex either. Doesn’t want it at fifteen, when they bring in the young KGB recruits to practice on. Doesn’t want it at sixteen, on her first seduction mission. Sex is a tool, nothing more. A tool for Natalia to use against her enemies and a tool for the Red Room to use against her, stripping her of the last vestiges of autonomy and control of her body.

A young woman named Natasha graduates from the Red Room Academy with highest honors on her seventeenth birthday. It’s a kill mission, the final test, and Natasha wonders if it makes her a bad person to feel more sullied by ones that require the intimate use of her body than when there is blood, warm and scarlet, dripping from her fingertips. As she is wheeled on a white cot into the sterilization room, she wonders if it matters.

Then she is out in the real world. Killing for the Red Room, killing for contracts once she breaks free and shakes their programming out of her head and out of her life—it doesn’t really make a difference. Madame B wasn’t lying when she said there was no place in the world for someone like Natasha. She is a weapon, and weapons only get used.

The first time she sees Clint Barton, he makes almost no impression. A man standing a rooftop away, looking in her direction. She dismisses him almost immediately—if he’s a threat, he’s one she’ll deal with easily later—and completes the mission. She almost forgets him by the time he crops up in her life again. Almost.

He stands over her with an arrow pointed directly at her left eye, unmoving. Her legs are pinned by a fallen support beam, not crushed but rendering her immobile. His eyes—a stormy blue-gray—bore into hers, as if he’s searching for something. He finds it. Lets her up, lets her go. She tries to kill him.

Maybe it’s haphazard. Maybe her heart isn’t in it, not that her heart has ever mattered before. She fails.

He drags her into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, introduces her from behind a one-way mirror to Nick Fury and Phil Coulson. She doesn’t know it yet, but these people will matter to her, someday.

He stands outside during interrogation after interrogation. She fights it, fights the questions, fights S.H.I.E.L.D., fights the guards who prevent her escape. He visits her at night, when the lights are off and the men in suits gone. He tells her it can be different. That she can change. That she can be good, in the moment at least. He doesn’t lie to her. He knows as well as she does that there is too much red in her ledger to ever scrub out.

When she finally acquiesces, finally gives in, he’s there, offering her his hand as the cuffs formerly binding hers fall away with a clink onto the floor. He’s with her the first time she sees sunlight again. He’s there for her first briefing, on her first mission for S.H.I.E.L.D.. She knows she owes him something—knows it in her bones, in the deepest fiber of her being even if their conversations are punctuated with more stony silences than words. She owes him a debt, and Natasha doesn’t know what to do with that. Debts are liabilities.

So she does what she’s been trained to do. Eliminate the threat. Straddles him in a safehouse bed after a successfully completed mission, kissing him roughly, her hands undoing the zipper on his pants. “Natasha,” he says when he pushes her off, trapping her under the strong forearms of a world-class archer. “What are you doing?”

She locks her legs around his arms, throws him off of her. “Paying a debt.” Her eyes are narrowed, but mind filled with confusion.

“Natasha, no,” Clint says, holding up a hand. “I don’t…I can’t…you don’t owe me anything.” She gives him a look, scoffing and questioning all at the same time. He swallows, a quick bob of his Adam’s apple. “Okay, maybe you feel like you do. You don’t, but if that’s what you feel, I understand that nothing I say will change that.” She moves toward him again. “But it’s bullshit. Whoever taught you this. You can’t repay me like that. Just…save my life or something, okay?”

He eyes her, and she lets her arms fall to her sides and shoulders release. “Good night, Barton.” She stands from the bed, turns to leave the room.

“Night, Romanoff.”

She does save his life, many times, and he hers, and somewhere along the way it changes from Barton to Clint and Romanoff to Natasha. They become partners, in the way that two people who trust no one can become partners—pushing and pulling, fighting and flighting, scrabbling for every inch and scrap of trust. She tells herself trust is different from dependence, camaraderie different from the cardinal sin of attachment. She tells herself she is no longer bound by the Red Room’s rules, but those same rules have kept her alive long past her expiration date. She doesn’t know if she can let go. She doesn’t know if she wants to.

Budapest seems like a normal mission when they depart, bantering with each other like a newlywed couple to keep up their cover on the commercial plane. Then they land, and the shoot-out happens, much bigger than expected, and Barton is compromised, growing pale and still as blood gushes out from between Natasha’s clenched fingers. All of a sudden she can’t do this, she can’t, and she calls S.H.I.E.L.D. for help only to find their line to the outside world cut.

There is no rescue, only Natasha, and she shoots and electrifies and snaps and smashes until their enemies are dead. She cauterizes Clint’s wound with a blow torch before dragging him bodily from the torn-up street, carrying him down three levels of a dilapidated warehouse with pipes leaking green-tinted water and the choking scent of mildew in the air that she knows, she knows will get his wound infected, but there’s nowhere else to go.

Her heart is in her throat when she looks at him, choking her, and she knows that it’s not supposed to be this way and her heart isn’t supposed to be involved at all, but somehow it is and Natasha doesn’t know what to do about it. She steals him blankets and antibiotics, every step outside the warehouse terrifying her because only two likely outcomes are possible—his death or hers, and either means she won’t see him again. The cardinal sin is pain and fear but also fuel, keeping her going for hours, days on end, pressing cool compresses to his heated flesh during the day and curling up under the blankets with him at night to keep them both warm. Her hand holds his wrist in the brief periods in which she sleeps, buying into the comforting lie that is the idea that she’ll wake if her fingers detect his pulse ever stops.

She is half-starved and he is nearly dead when S.H.I.E.L.D. finally finds them, a squadron of agents in black gear appearing out of the shadows. Natasha nearly kills them all until she realizes they’re friendlies, that she has such thing as friendlies now, but even that thought is not enough to keep her from knocking out the man in charge when she learns she will not be taken on the medi-copter with Clint to the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. hospital. She bowls through them then, the agents who have saved their lives, and jumps through the air to catch the foot of the chopper with one hand. It tilts dangerously, but she hauls herself up until she can wrench the outer door open and climb inside. The medics wordlessly scoot to make room for her, a mix of fear and surprise and admiration on their faces, because, after all—what can they do to stop her?

Only Coulson is able to prevent her from following him into surgery, a gentle hand on her shoulder that does more than a show of brute force ever could. “Let them help him, Natasha,” he says quietly. “You’re not alone anymore.”

Once he’s out and in his own bed in the ICU nothing can stop her from joining him, sitting silently in a corner through both Fury and Coulson’s visits, eyes never leaving him. They are wise enough not to interrogate her about what happened, to leave the debriefing for later, although even with her head turned away she thinks she catches a significant look between the two as they leave.

Clint is in a coma, medically induced, as if that’s supposed to make the slack look on his pale face any easier to bear. The right side of his chest is a swath of clean white bandages, a far cry from the mix of congealed blood and dust and grime that had been there before, and Natasha takes that as a good thing. Coulson comes back suggests that she go get some rest—he’s even gotten her a hotel room—but she refuses. “What are you going to do, sleep here?” Coulson asks, but it’s not really a question.

“He’s my partner,” she says softly, voice cracking from disuse. At night she curls up on his bed, head resting on his uninjured shoulder and fingers clasped around his wrist, like they’re still in that damp, moldy warehouse. Because she is, will keep replaying events in her mind and wondering what she could have done differently that doesn’t lead to this, and she won’t leave it until he wakes up, until he looks at her with those blue-gray eyes and says her name and asks, “What happened, Natasha?” and more importantly, “So what’s the tally again?”

“Forty-three, me, forty-one, you,” she tells him when he wakes up days later.

He frowns. “That doesn’t seem right.”

“You just don’t like the fact that you’re losing,” she teases him, her body and mind flooded with the foreign feeling of happiness to see him whole and coherent and okay.

“I don’t know, is it still losing if it’s saving you?” he asks, completely serious.

She laughs it off, but inside something soars. “It is if it means I get to keep saving your ass afterwards. That’s just survival. Everything’s a competition, Barton.”

He smiles. “Glad to see you haven’t changed while I was out, Nat.”

Her eyes narrow. “Don’t call me that. Sounds like a tiny fly.”

“Then don’t call me Barton...” He pauses. “…Nat.”

“I said—”

“And a gnat is oh-so-different from a spider?” he asks, teasing.

“Spiders eat gnats,” Natasha grumbles. “And you don’t come running asking me to kill a gnat for you when you find one on the ceiling.”

The name Nat sticks, as do Natasha’s protests, although eventually she grows to treasure it, not that she’d ever tell him that. She stays with him through rehab, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with him, surprising herself with how much she enjoys their odd sort of domesticity—cleaning guns together on the couch, hearing explosions from another room and hurrying to take the batteries out of the smoke detector before it catches on that Clint’s tinkering with his explosive arrows again, but also cooking and cleaning and all the other things that she supposes are normal for cohabitation.

When he’s finally given the all-clear from medical, things go back to normal, except she knows more about him now. Snippets gleaned from longer parts of other conversations. A rough childhood, abuse, a brother, the circus. A woman. The first time he mentions her Natasha’s stomach clenches and she doesn’t know why. She tells herself it’s because Bobbi was his partner before her, not because she’s beautiful and unsullied and most of all uncomplicated, something Natasha will never be.

“That was a long time ago,” he says, when she mentions her casually in Belarus. “It didn’t end well.”

“Why?” she wants to ask but doesn’t. She catches snippets though, over the course of dozens of missions.

“God, I sound like Bobbi.”

“Even three years later, she still manages to interfere with my missions.”

“Jesus, Nat, I haven’t been this worried since the pregnancy scare of ‘04.”

She doesn’t know what to think when her feelings change, because it’s not so much a change as a deepening. She cares about him: that much is clear and that much, six years out from her Red Room training, she can live with.

He’s a good partner. It’d be a shame to lose him.

Reliable.

Effective.

Funny, sometimes, when he cracks jokes with his dry wit.

Cute, maybe, a little, when small things go bad.

“Aw, coffee, no.”

“Aw, bowstring, no.”

“Aw, deadly assassin, no.”

She doesn’t mention any of this, of course. She keeps it locked away deep in her chest, because to say it out loud would be to make it real, and making it real puts her in danger. Puts them in danger.

Sometimes she lets him know though, in the small things. Things she could stop, if she chose to, but things that slip out when she feels heady and rash and dare she say it—hopeful. A lingering gaze in meetings. Making sure some small part of their bodies is touching when they sleep in the same bed for ops. A smile she reserves only for him.

Natasha knows, deep down, that she doesn’t have a chance, of course. She is too broken, carrying too much trauma, too used. Most of all, she doesn’t deserve something with him, not that she’s admitting to wanting such a thing either. He would never want to engage himself so fully in someone steeped in so much red.

But he makes her hope. He watches her, too, with something other than the wary gaze of a man betrayed one time too many. He shares secrets under the cover of darkness. He smiles.

It’s not a promise, but it _feels_ like one. He cares about her, despite her history and her many flaws. No one’s ever done that before.

So when one day, out of the blue, he says he wants her to meet someone, she is blindsided by the young woman sitting on his sofa, smiling at her and extending a hand. She is a couple years older than Natasha, closer to Clint’s age. She is not a breathtaking beauty but homely and pleasant with a warmth in her eyes that Natasha knows she could never hope to attain.

When she shakes her hand, it is lightly calloused from hard work.

“Natasha,” Clint says, “This is my fiancée, Laura,” and her world falls apart around her.

“Not until you actually propose I’m not,” Laura teases him with a roll of her eyes.

“I’m working on it,” Clint replies, and it’s obvious he’s said this many times before. Natasha’s stomach tightens and it takes all of her training to keep the friendly smile plastered on her face and to keep her legs from bolting out the door.

“Come here, sit,” Laura says invitingly, gesturing to the couch beside her. Natasha’s sat on the ratty old thing so many times that the gesture of being given permission strikes her like a blow. She’s never needed it before.

When the two hours of exquisite torture are over, Clint drives her back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. base in silence.

“Something’s wrong,” he says as he gets on the interstate. Her entire body screams _YES_ but somehow none of it makes it out her mouth. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I couldn’t...I had to know that I... The only other person who knows is Fury himself. Completely off the record. Part of a deal I made when I signed on.”

He’s so off it hurts, because how could he not know? The knife in her gut twists.

But she can’t say that, because she has no right. No claim to him. Ever thinking she did was deluding herself. So she plays along. “Two years, Barton.”

“I know,” he sighs. “Forgive me, Nat?”

She’s silent, the lump in her throat choking her as her mind wars it out. She’s angry and hurt and disgusted—with him but not with him, much more with herself. For believing she could ever be enough. For believing he could ever want her. For allowing herself to become so vulnerable, for committing the cardinal sin of attachment.

For one single moment, she wishes she were back in the Red Room, that she’d never heard of Clinton Francis Barton, and that she never fell in love with him.

Then she shoves that feeling down, and smiles. “Always, Clint.” And, infinitesimally quieter, “Thank you for telling me.”

“Of course,” he says. “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, Nat. You’re important to me, and I want you to know.”

Once upon a time a line like that would have made something inside her soar, but now it only generates an ache deep in her chest.

The return to normal is sickeningly fast. Missions to Morocco, to Berlin, to Budapest all over again. This time around Clint is awake for the action but Natasha still feels chills run up her arm when they pass the alley leading to where they had been holed up last time. Where he’d nearly died. Where she kept him alive.

Clint had been wrong, before. It’s obvious now that saving his life isn’t nearly enough.

She doesn’t know what would be.

She certainly isn’t.

Living a lie, Natasha finds, is easier than the truth. Pretending nothing has changed. Pretending, if she’s being honest, that Laura doesn’t exist.

Because Natasha is the one patching up his bullet holes. Natasha is the one providing him cover fire. Natasha is the one holding him through the nightmares.

And yet he always goes home to _her_.

She doesn’t lie to herself about not feeling anything anymore. There’s too much pain to be remotely near convincing.

But she comes up now and again, brief stabbing moments of pain that Natasha hides behind platitudes and encouragement, because what else can she do?

“Definitely her favorite flower over roses, it shows you listen,” Natasha says.

“Someplace you both have been together, where you made good memories.”

“This band, with that setting. And half a carat is fine—it’ll get in the way less.”

Saying the words is hard. Helping him is harder. But not screaming the three words shouted over and over in her head during every second of these conversations together is hardest.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes inspiration from the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye comics, the Margaret Stohl book Black Widow: Forever Red (which I wasn't a huge fan of but which contained a few worthwhile headcanons about the Red Room), and of course the MCU. I would love to - and fully intended to - write a second chapter about Natasha coming to terms with everything, but I have no idea how to do that. Honestly, this story is a good representation of my life right now, and since I haven't figured it out, I can't write how she did either. When (or if) I ever figure it out, she will too.
> 
> Advice or commiseration most welcome, as always.


End file.
